Swimming, Bikes, Baseball, and School

On Saturday, William and Niamh finished off their swimming lessons for the season. On her third try Niamh finally passed her course, and William passed his as well. Niamh will start her next lessons in the summer, but William will be playing baseball instead.

Also on Saturday, Alana went to a community garage sale and picked up a bike for Niamh. We have a few kids bikes, but Niamh is still too small for them, so Alana found a 12-inch rimmed bike for her to learn on. So after brining the kids back from swimming lessons, I installed the training wheels on Niamh’s new bike and helped her learn how to ride.

Since I had to set up sound for church that day, we decided to have her and William come with me on their bikes while I taught Niamh. It’s about 1 km from our house to the church, so it gave her plenty of time to learn. On the way there, I held both of her handle bars and basically pushed her to the church while she learned how to maneuver the pedals properly to move forward. Since turning the pedals backwards stops the bike, it was a bit of a jolted experience, but she started getting better towards the end.

On the way back, I started out the same way as on the way to church, but then I took one hand off the left handle bar and pushed her with my hand on her back. She didn’t like that at first, but she was peddling quite a bit better and she didn’t mind after a bit. Then I took my hand off the right handle bar and told her to steer. She definitely didn’t like that at first, but when she got the hang of steering, she didn’t mind anymore. A little while later, I took my hand off her back. Again, resistance at first, but not long after when I put my hand on her back again, she got angry at me because she wanted to do it herself.

Needless to say, the ride back was a lot easier than the ride on the way to church was. Every once in a while I had to push her a little bit to get her started again when she got stuck, but for the most part she was able to peddle by herself. In the past few days she’s been able to go pretty well by herself. Now she just needs to learn to keep her toes pointed forward so that she can get a bit more power, but she’s progressing very well.

As for baseball, we had two more games since the last update – and we’ve had two more wins. One of our players is out for the season (or for a while, at least) after breaking his knee in two places and tearing some ligaments in his leg a couple of games ago. He was going for a pop-up and twisted and fell on his leg fairly awkwardly early on in the game (exactly how it happened, I’m not sure). My brother says he heard a pop, and the player had to be carried to the bench. He’s hoping to be able to come out to at least watch some of the games in a couple of weeks, and he sounds like he’s been able to take it well, so that much is good, at least.

Other than that, Niamh is very excited to be going to school for her first time today. She’s doing a test day before she starts Jr. Kindergarten in the Fall. Right now she’s probably just about ready to come back home. Hopefully she had a lot of fun.